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Debility and Disability in Edith Wharton's Novels City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research Queens College 2020 Debility and Disability in Edith Wharton's Novels Karen Weingarten CUNY Queens College How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/qc_pubs/406 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] DEBILITY AND DISABILITY IN EDITH WHARTON’S NOVELS KAREN WEINGARTEN At the end of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Lily Bart, the novel’s protagonist, falls into a downward spiral: without a marriage proposal in sight and her money nearly gone, Lily can no longer support the extravagant lifestyle she constructed with the help of New York’s high society—and particularly its adoring men. Des- perate to pay her bills, she agrees to work at a millinery, a position two of her friends find for her because she had always been good at trimming her own hats. Lily, however, fails miserably at this work. On the one hand, Lily’s failure to succeed in her position could be the result of a lack of training and a disdain for the mundane tasks assigned her. Yet, the narrative also provides hints that Lily’s body is starting to fail her. For months, as she tells her friend Gerty, she has been plagued with sleepless nights and then drowsy days that make concentrating difficult (Wharton 1984, 254). And when she looks at yet another hat she has been unable to sew, she notes that the forewoman’s criticisms of her are warranted: “the sewing on of the spangles was inexcusably bad. What made her so much more clumsy than usual? Was it a growing distaste for her task, or actual physical disability? She felt tired and confused: it was an effort to put her thoughts together” (275). As she leaves the millinery that day, sourly reflecting on her new working-class position, a kind COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 47.3 Summer 2020 Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286 © Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University 2020 CLT 47.3 1st proof text.indd 580 Karen Weingarten | E SSAYS 581 co-worker offers her some encouragement by telling her that her poor work is clearly the result of not feeling well. “Miss Bart,” she tells her, “I guess you can sew those spangles on as well as I can when you’re feeling right” (275). Lily’s observations of her own body, confirmed by those of her few remaining friends, suggest that Lily’s failure at sewing hats isn’t just because she sees the work as beneath her. Feeling poorly, Lily leaves her place of employment for the last time with “increasing physical weariness” (276) and gives into the temptation to stop in at the chemist’s to purchase chloral, a sleep- ing potion that will soon lead to her death. There has been much criticism speculating on the cause of Lily’s death: Was it intentional suicide? Accidental poisoning? Does she overdose on a drug that she had become addicted to? Or does Lily’s demise fit into a pat- tern woven through several of Wharton’s novels that documents the slow, and sometimes fast, debilitation of characters, most often because of economic conditions? In one of the last scenes of The House of Mirth, Lily’s old acquain- tance Nettie finds her and notes just how sick Lily appears (Whar- ton 1984, 301). No one else sees her again after this encounter and so the illness that plagues Lily is just as mysterious as the motivation behind her death. But there’s no question about her state: Lily is sick and her illness contributes to her death because the chloral she drinks was meant to help with all her sleepless nights. To return to and extend Lily’s question about herself: if she is actually phys- ically disabled in the last chapters of the novel, how is her bodily transformation a reflection of her economic decline? Through examining several of Wharton’s other novels with characters that are disabled or debilitated, I’ll argue that a significant thread run- ning through many of Wharton’s novels is an examination of the relationship between disability and economic status, and ultimately a resistance to understanding disability as a static identity that can be delinked from socioeconomic conditions. In Wharton’s novels, bodies that receive social recognition for their impairment fore- shadow contemporary understandings of disability that emerged in the mid-twentieth century with the disability rights movement. However, Wharton also identifies another classification of bodies: those that have become debilitated because of their economic and political conditions. This distinction is crucial, I’ll argue, to under- standing how disability emerged as a recognized (and protected) identity, and ultimately, the repercussions this has for how disability is understood today. CLT 47.3 1st proof text.indd 581 582 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 47.3 Summer 2020 First, however, what does it mean to understand disability as identity? Most disability studies scholars accept that disability con- sists of both impairment, which is medically defined, and the obsta- cles faced when infrastructural arrangements or social beliefs refuse to accommodate impairments. The editors of Keywords for Disabil- ity Studies explain it succinctly as: “disability is produced as much by environmental and social factors as it is by bodily conditions” (Adams, Reiss, and Serlin 2015, 5). Following this definition, using a wheelchair for mobility only poses a problem when buildings aren’t equipped with ramps or elevators. Being deaf might only be a chal- lenge when interpreters aren’t provided or when other technologies don’t exist to aid with communication. In other words, wheelchair use and deafness are only disabilities insofar as our existing infra- structural world and belief system refuse to accommodate these dif- ferent modes of being in the world. Disability’s status as an identity, as what Lennard Davis calls a “political and cultural formation,” is fairly recent and emerged only in the 1970s (2002, 10). The Ameri- cans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which gave people with disabili- ties some limited political recognition and protection, was created even more recently, in 1990. Yet the word disability, as used to describe variances in ability, has a much longer history. The OED, for example, traces a use of the word that resonates with the contem- porary definition to 1561 in early English drama.1 Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell argue, however, that the negative associations with disability—disability as something to fear, disability as a reason to ostracize—can be traced to the eugenics era in the United States (2006, 3), precisely at the time that Wharton was writing. Draw- ing on Snyder and Mitchell’s work, Ellen Samuels has argued that discourses of normalcy—or abnormalcy—in the nineteenth century intimately tie race to disability: any race not labeled white was con- structed as disabled and disability was often discussed in racializ- ing terms (2014, 15). It is this emerging construction of disability, one that links disability to subject position, to identity, that Whar- ton’s work explores. However, as I’ll demonstrate below, Wharton’s understanding of disability was prescient enough to recognize that disability is not a homogenous category. There are different ways to be identified as disabled, and many of them are tied to levels of eco- nomic privilege, as Wharton’s novels often show.2 Disability Studies arose as a field in the 1980s, and the first dis- ability studies scholars rightfully argued for understanding disabil- ity as an identity in much the same way as scholars had been writing CLT 47.3 1st proof text.indd 582 Karen Weingarten | E SSAYS 583 about gender, sexuality, class, and race.3 More recently, however, some scholars have begun challenging this understanding of disabil- ity as a stable identity, along similar lines to those feminist theorists who challenged the coherence of “woman” as a stable, unified iden- tity. For example, Jasbir Puar’s work moves to deconstruct the binary set up by traditional definitions of disability: that bodies are either disabled or abled. She argues that a culture of neoliberalism, which rests on individuality, competition, and autonomy, encourages us to view our bodies as always in need of improvement, as always being not quite right. Puar (2017) draws on Julie Livingston’s ethnographic work on debility in Botswana, a framework Livingston developed as she came to realize that the concept of disability didn’t translate well linguistically and socially in the communities she was study- ing. While “disability” has now commonly been defined by disability studies scholars working in the global west and north as a social con- struction, the very understanding of “social construction,” as Liv- ingston’s work shows, is itself culturally situated. Livingston’s work in part complicates the more conventional definitions of disability accepted by disability studies scholars. Yet, as Livingston points out, these infrastructural worlds and belief systems vary by culture and location. An impairment in the twenty-first-century United States might be labeled a disability, while in Botswana that same impair- ment might be seen as a “normal” difference because there aren’t the same infrastructural or social obstacles. Therefore, an impairment, such as blindness, to take one example, isn’t necessarily disabling in the ways it might be in the United States or Western Europe because of the social or familial resources that make moving through one’s environment easier (Livingston 2005, 6-8).
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